Ivan Kozlov

Born June 24 (July 5), 1888, in the village of Sandyri, Kolomna District, present-day Kolomna, Moscow Oblast; died Mar. 26, 1957, in Moscow. Soviet party figure; writer. Member of the Communist Party from 1905. Son of a peasant.

Kozlov worked at the Kolomna machine-building plant. He participated in the Revolution of 1905–07. He was arrested twice (1908 and 1909); in 1909 he was sentenced to four years at hard labor and exile for life in Siberia. In 1913 he fled from exile and emigrated. He returned to Russia in March 1917. During the Civil War of 1918–20 he worked in the party underground in Sevastopol’ and Kharkov. After studying at the V. la. Briusov Higher Literary Institute (1923–25), he resumed party work. In the Great Patriotic War (1941–45), Kozlov was a leader of the party underground and the partisan movement in the Crimea, as well as secretary of the Simferopol’ underground city committee of the party.

Kozlov’s first literary works were published in the 1920’s (the play The Underground, 1920, and the novella The Shock, 1926). After the war, despite a severe illness (and total blindness), he carried on his literary work. He wrote several fictional memoirs about the party underground and the partisan movement. Kozlov received the State Prize of the USSR (1948). He was awarded the Order of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner, and various medals.